Chapter Twenty-One
LACEY
“So how was your cloak and dagger meeting?” Kate asks me. She’s perched on my desk when I walk back to the product pod.
I roll my eyes because I’m being petulant and toxic today.
“Just living the dream,” I tell her, sitting down in my chair and giving myself a nice long spin.
“Are you really not going to tell me what it was about?” she asks.
I tilt back and look at the ceiling. “Just tell Jude you want to know. He’ll get you an NDA to sign and give you all the bad news. Then you can be just as happy as I am.”
“You guys talking about Corday Ford?” Trevor says, sitting down in his cube.
“I knew it,” Kate says, getting up. “Trevor, you’re such a dipshit.”
“Is that really all you were here for?” I ask her as she walks away.
“Absolutely!” she calls without turning back.
I roll my eyes at Trevor. It’s a reflex now, it’s all I did through the kickoff meeting, and it’s probably all I’ll do through the whole integration. Or until I leave or get fired.
“Everyone knows,” he insists.
“Yes, because you’re telling them.”
“Listen, little bro.” He swings a leg over to the base of my chair and uses his foot to roll me closer to him.
“A couple things. One, this shit’s not that deep.
You gotta stop treating it like it’s life or death, okay?
It’s a newsletter that people put on the Internet and they email it around.
That’s all it is. You and my boy in there are acting like a volcano just exploded on us. That shit’s not healthy.”
“Okay,” I say, wondering how I got to a place so dark that Trevor became the voice of wisdom.
“Two, whatever you and Jude have going on with the boot knocking, that’s your biz. But he’s the CEO, dude. It’s his company. And he’s already kicking his own ass pretty hard, so he doesn’t need you doing it, too.”
“Alright,” I tell him, because for once, I don’t feel like arguing. It’s also possible he has a point.
“Everyone knows you’re better than me, but I’m taking Project Z. You’re going to chill and prioritize the bug queue or watch refrigerator stocking videos on TikTok. We cool?”
“We’re cool,” I say, rolling back to my desk and into the bug queue.
This morning when I stormed out of the office, I wondered if maybe that was it.
I imagined a version of my life where I never returned to the Lettercat offices again.
Kate could pack my stuff up for me in one of those boxes that appear when there are layoffs.
Maybe Faith and Layla would still be interested in me, or I could find another startup.
Or maybe I’d pack my entire studio into a U-Haul and move somewhere down on the Central Coast, close enough to home that I could go have dinner with my parents on Sundays.
Get a normal job with normal hours and try to learn how to behave like a regular employee.
I walked the path along the bay and felt bad about everything.
And then I came back.
Not because of Jude, or for Lettercat. I came back for Ingrid and Dave, maybe even a little bit for Trevor.
It feels unfair to bail on them out of the blue, to leave them with this stupid fucking traitorous project on their own.
I might hate everything we’re doing and the people we’re doing it for, but I’m a team player, goddammit.
If I do end up leaving, I’ll do it the right way.
I’m at work for the next few days, but I’m not.
I attend all the meetings, I’m present for the conversations, but I don’t engage.
I have nothing nice to say so I don’t say anything at all.
I flit around the edges of things while decisions get made.
I copy tasks into the tracking system, I log the dependencies that others flag, I prioritize based on what I’m told.
My brain isn’t in it, much less my heart.
If Glenn were here, he’d give me a talking to. But he’s not.
“Is there a point where you’re going to be done sulking?” Dave asks, when I refuse to go out for lunch again.
“I’m not sulking. I brought leftovers.”
“So bring them. We’ll get something we can eat on a bench,” he says.
“We’re concerned about you,” Ingrid tells me.
“Is this an intervention?” I ask. But I go, because I remember that I’m here to support my team, not be the Ghost of Lettercat Past.
I sit on a bench and pick at the remainders of last night’s burrito bowl, jealous of the shawarmas Dave and Ingrid are eating, as well as their detachment when discussing our employment situation.
“The real trick,” Dave says between bites, “is deciding if the potential payout is worth staying for.”
“It’s not,” Ingrid tells him. “Unless you have way more equity than I do. I did some research: the deal will probably be structured so there are multiple payments. Corday Ford has a history of keeping people until the quarter where the final payout comes, so the cash stays on the books as long as possible. Then they do layoffs. You’re looking at a full year if you stay. ”
“So why bother?” Dave asks.
“Indeed,” Ingrid says.
“Do you think they’ll hire when people start leaving in the short term?” he wonders.
“I don’t intend to be around to find out,” she says.
Jude walks past our bench and they both go quiet. He’s wearing headphones, and whatever he’s focused on has him distracted enough not to notice us. Or he pretends not to.
“You kind of have to feel sorry for the guy,” Dave says, once Jude’s out of earshot.
“Do you?” I ask.
“Maybe he didn’t handle it so well, but this can’t be what he’s been working for all these years. You guys want to go get a cookie?”
Every day I think about walking into Jude’s office to just say hello. Each night I consider texting him to see how he’s doing. But I can see how busy he is, and I know that he’s miserable. It could be that I owe him an apology, only I don’t think I’m sorry.
I’m not sure what we were before, but we’re not that anymore. Instead, Jude and I are just two people who work at the same company.
At least we do for now.
For our next meeting, Faith and Layla have given me a case study to work on.
I open it, hungrily; they want me to propose an AI agent that assists families with travel.
I promptly send a text to a few people I know with kids, asking them what the worst part about booking travel is for their family.
I get a few replies, ask some follow-up questions, then put on my sneakers.
Coming home when it’s still daylight means I can walk around my neighborhood, up to the top of Nob Hill and sit in the park and watch people walk their dogs while I think great thoughts about the future of travel.
It’s nice to have a place for my brain to land. I’m surprised at how refreshing it is to have a new problem to solve, one completely separate from email deliverability issues and founders with soft brown eyes who separate your chopsticks for you.
Despite their request that I spend only four to six hours on the exercise, I dig in until I’ve designed a true flywheel, that not only optimizes travel with kids but learns from the customer’s own preferences but also the habits of others with similarly-aged children.
The more often you book, the better it gets.
I put a presentation together, along with interactive wireframes and some market data. I practice my presentation on FaceTime for my sister, who doesn’t understand anything about software development but swears she finds my work gripping nonetheless.
I’m ready, then. The only way I know how to make it better would be if I could run it past Jude.
“This is brilliant,” Layla says.
“Truly,” Faith says. “We’re not blowing smoke. It’s fascinating to see your thinking on a problem we’ve been poking at for so long. I’m sort of embarrassed we didn’t come up with this ourselves.”
“Thank you,” I tell them. “I’m sure if we collaborated it would be even better.”
“Absolutely,” Layla says. “Though our goals have shifted since we spoke last. We’ll get you an NDA to sign before we get into the details, but we’re cultivating some major airline relationships right now.”
“We’re going to be so focused on the business side that we’ll be counting on product and technical leadership to just take the reins and build,” Faith tells me.
I nod like it’s exciting, like it’s not filled with unknowns.
Such as, what’s the technical leader like and will I get along with them?
When there’s a disagreement, how will it be resolved?
Do a marketing and an ops person have the focus and vision to lead a software company, especially if they’re busy chasing relationships with airlines?
I tell myself to relax. These are all questions I can ask if I get an offer.
“So what would your timeline be,” Layla is asking me, “if we were to make you an offer next week? Because I don’t want to speak for Faith…”
“No, go ahead, you can.”
“We’ll probably be making you an offer next week.”
I take the bus home and try to feel elated. I shook Faith and Layla’s hands when I left. I told them how much I’d enjoyed working on the case study, how it gave me a real-life feel for what it would be like to solve the type of problems I’d be solving, and that I liked it.
All of that is true, every bit of it. But a pair of founders who uninterested and uninvolved in the product seems like the biggest, reddest of flags.
When I pressed them on technical leadership, they seemed cagey and mentioned offshore teams and an open role they’ll be filling soon.
Either they’re not trying to build anything more than a sales and marketing operation, or they’re going to perpetually drive the dev teams crazy by not engaging until the last minute, when they surface just in time to swoop and poop.
There’s a small chance that I’m afraid of the unknown. There’s a decent chance I’d be jumping into a shitshow where the team I get to build is miserable and the product I’m working on is stuck together with AI and Scotch Tape.
No job is perfect, but some of them come a lot closer than others. And the one person who can help me make this decision is the person I’d be giving notice to.